Che the dog, who is too old to see well, has the friend he really needs – he just doesn’t know it yet. Get a PDF ebook edition for only $2.99. There is also a nice print version. Besides the illustrated story, I put extra drawings on the page corners. These can be used as a flipbook, the front and the back of pages. For any intrepid little reader that wants to see how animation works, there are additional pages of drawings that show the complete movements of Che and his friend. The book finishes with a color catalog of the native wildflowers in Che’s garden.

Promoting child literacy and literature can only be a good thing. I figure kids have seen enough unicorns and teddy bears to hurl chunks, so I took a different path. Good literature gives us wild imaginings our whole life. I have no trouble imagining wild things, already.

I animated the ‘book reading’ scenes with Anime Studio Pro. The vector and IK tools make for smooth, calm movement. The real action, what is figuratively between the pages, has a rough line from being sketched out in Pencil open source software. That was animated straight ahead almost as fast as I conceived it. The color fills are in a back layer, so the sketchiness is intentionally preserved. Backgrounds were painted simply in Photoshop. Shadows, spotlit accenting and composites were in After Effects.